Ubuntu – How to create deb installer from tarballs?

executablepackage-managementpackagingsoftware installation

Possible Duplicate:
Simplest Debian Packaging Guide?

There are several tarballs (e.g. Firefox, Eclipse, Zend Studio and …) that have executable files in them, that we can extract and run. but this executable will be available only for the user that extracts it.

If we want to make it available for all users we should move it to some location like /usr/share, /usr/local/share/, /opt/, … and give appropriate permissions, make an executable file in /usr/bin/ and so on…

I want to make a deb installer file that does them all!
How to do it?

Best Answer

Ubuntu wiki links:

If it's a source, compile the source and then look into checkinstall. It makes deb packages from compiled source code.

checkinstall

A guide for using checkinstall

Also you can try the following,

To get a deb from a tar.gz install alien

sudo apt-get install alien

then go to the tar.gz folder and:

alien -k filename.tar.gz

then double click on the new deb file to install it. (gdebi needs to be installed)

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – launching executable from /usr/local/bin needs access to local file

Instead of the symbolic link you can create a wrapper script in /usr/local/bin:

#! /bin/sh
cd /opt/octane
exec ./octane "$@"

Make the script executable with chmod +x /usr/local/bin/octane.

The "$@" are the command line arguments, so you can still run octane an_argument.

The script changes the CWD (current working directory) only inside the script, because the script is run in a whole new shell instance which ends at the end of the script. Changing the current working directory for the executable might actually be a problem if you want to give a relative pathname to the executable. E.g. if you are in your home directory and run octane a_file_in_the_home_directory, it doesn't work, because the octane executable is called with a CWD of /opt/octane, and a_file_in_the_home_directory is not in /opt/octane. If that is a concern, you can either remember to give absolute pathnames only (octane ~/a_file_in_the_home_directory) or use a more complicated version of the script.

Best Answer

checkinstall

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – launching executable from /usr/local/bin needs access to local file

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